About bytewriter.com

Emery JeffreysBytewriter.com was established in 1999 by Emery Jeffreys, a recovering journalist, as an on online consultancy to provide simple technology solutions. bytewriter.com is built using the Internet's best practices.

Cover photos by Emery JeffreysI began my career as a reporter at my hometown daily newspaper, The Logan Banner in Logan, W.Va. It was one of the first newspapers in West Virginia to use computer terminals for writing articles. One of my first big stories was the Buffalo Creek flood which killed 125 people when a coal slag dam collapsed in February 1972. Photographs I made of the disaster were included in Death at Buffalo Creek: The Story Behind the West Virginia Flood Disaster of 1972 by Tom Nugent, then a veteran reporter at the Detroit Free Press.

Like most reporters, I've worked at a number of newspapers. Eventually I landed at United Press International. Some of the stories covered include the fall of televangelist Jim Bakker, infamous criminal trials, the invasion of Panama and the beginning of the first Persian Gulf war. Published works include the LA Times, Stars and Stripes and the Washington Post.

At UPI the connection with computers entered my life -- filing stories remotely with a Radio shack TRS-80. Then, against my wife's better judgement, I bought a Leading Edge computer with a 40 megabyte hard drive, the largest available at that time.

Using that computer without the aid of Election News Service, we used a simple Excel spread sheet macro to tally results in the key U.S. Senate primary race between Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt and U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. UPI declared Gantt the Democrat primary winner -- hours ahead of the AP and Election News Service -- all because of a tiny Excel template.

After the bankruptcy of UPI, I moved on to The Daytona Beach News-Journal and worked as a business writer and learning Computer-Assisted Reporting Research. After convincing the newspaper brass that a website was needed, I built the first online newspaper in Floirda before it was considered cool.

While I built the first online newspapers in Florida, I studied avanced Unix and C programming at Embry-Riddle University..

Proud MountaineerI also worked as a Senior News Producer at Central Florida News 13, one of the largest 24-hour news channels in the southeast U.S. There was also a stint as a producer for Road Runner, and managing editor Around Central Florida, Road Runner's Central Florida affiliate.

The latest stories I cover are featured on the home page and include space and science, tech and security, today's top stories, and documenting Applachia. I frequently cover launches by SpaceX, Blue Horizon and the United Launch Alliance, all from nearby Kennedy Space Center.